Love is an Angel Disguised as Lust
by Anna Catherine
Summary: Takes place during the summer after season 1. Logan gets a visit from Lilly who wants to say goodbye.


Love is an Angel Disguised as Lust

The taste of nicotine smoldered over his chapped, broken lips, burning a hole in his lungs. He tossed the butt of the cigarette into the ocean, destroying something beautiful, vast and endless.

He'd done this before, smoked until he couldn't speak. The last time he'd done this, Duncan was by his side, inhaling right along with him. There was no Duncan to reminisce with, just the chalky pebbles of sand, a shaky breeze and desperate waves crashing to the shore. Duncan's arms were probably wrapped around Logan's ex girlfriend who was Duncan's ex girlfriend – new girlfriend now.

Logan tilted the pack of Newport's open again, shaking a cigarette out into his hand. It didn't take him long to light it. It was a practiced art he'd developed with years of angst and tragedy. Lilly used to smoke Marlboro lights with delicate fingers and pouty lips. Logan remembers those things; the bad and the good. The way a cigarette could dangle from her lips like she owned it, not the other way around. Everything was like that with Lilly. Nothing and no one owned her.

Logan dipped his fingers into the sand, looking only briefly up at the star-filled sky, letting the cigarette hang from the corner of his mouth as he breathed in it's unhealthy ruggedness. There was nothing left for him. Weevil had taken pity on him, a small amount of compassion. He had helped Logan down off that cliff the moment the car radio blasted out that it was his father who had killed Lilly and attempted to kill Veronica. After that, his ability to care about anything or anyone slipped passed him like a grain of sand.

Veronica seemed like a faded, tainted memory. He often woke up from nightmares about her, her lips on his skin, bare breasted, teasing him with her fingernails or she'd be screaming at him about how he murdered Lilly and either spectrum was just as horrible. He didn't want to see her or be around her. Now those lips that had touched his, were coursing their way, no doubt, down Duncan's neck. Jealousy wouldn't have been the right word to express his feelings. Numb would've worked better, not that anyone really cared about what he felt.

There was nothing left for him, no one left to escape into.

"You know she thinks about you," Lilly said appearing next to him like magic. _She's always doing that_, he thinks. The gash his father left on the side of her head is gone. Her blonde golden hair lay across her shoulders, glowing in the moonlight. That lilac sweater he loved so much, dashed along her milky skin. Logan grunted, smiling only a little bit.

"You're _still_ beautiful," he whispered, ignoring her comment about Veronica, blowing smoke out from between his lips. It dangled in the air around them, around him.

She smiled, that perfect smile he knew so well. The one in all the pictures he'd taken of her at the beach, in his bedroom, her bedroom, everywhere. The ones he'd put away after Veronica and he kissed, the ones he tried to say goodbye to but stuffed under his bed in a shoebox full of memories.

The notes she used to write him in between class with doodles of the teachers that annoyed her and a lily underneath her name, were crumbled from unfolding and folding again, over and over again in that box. He tried to wipe them away, wipe her away. She would apply cherry lip-gloss and leave lip prints all over the blue lined paper with scribbled words about their weekend together. If he was lucky, he got two a day. Those were the days Lilly had gym or skipped gym.

Lilly watched him in the way an old lover does, with a certain magnetism, wanting to drink him in before it's all over and done with. Logan could feel her jeans against his own, like a knife to his insides. He couldn't be sure if he'd passed out on the sand, dreaming, or hallucinating, because he missed her so much. He wanted to tell her not to touch him and to be cliché and tell her he would _die_ if she touched him but she does anyway as if reading his mind.

"I miss you," Lilly squeezed all her life force, all she'd been given for that moment and pressed her hand onto his knee, resting it there like old times; the days when they had skinny dipped in the ocean after drinking way too much and held onto each other to keep their balance. He would always kiss her first, under a pregnant moon with his wet fingers entangled in the strands of her sandy hair.

She always tasted like chocolate and alcohol, leaving him with the notion the two always went together. He couldn't have cream filled chocolates with vodka anymore. The mere idea of picking expensive chocolates out of a box to mix with anything that involved alcohol still made him physically ill. That was Lilly – Lilly and him, chocolate and alcohol, small things to ease the pain of things to come.

"Ditto," Logan whispered while he pulled at the freshly lit cigarette in between his lips and threw it into the ocean. It disappeared behind a foamy, washed up wave. Lilly tilted her head to stare at him pensively making him uneasy. He turned to look at her. She didn't look like a ghost or even a vision. She just looked like Lilly, his Lilly. Eventually she'd be gone because she never could stay no matter how many dreams or hallucinations he had about her.

"Do you remember our first kiss?" Lilly smiled, looking up at the sky. She never really did understand Veronica's fascination with the sky until she died. Its endless, infinite, amount of possibilities surrounding the universe, surely making every human being feel like a small spec in a life force much bigger than just them. Lilly tried not to give it much thought but she missed Veronica's run on sentences about which star was what and what the mythology on each one was. Being dead didn't teach her much about those things.

"I remember doing a canon ball into the pool at your house," Logan answered thinking back to that day. "And you in that bikini," his eyes glazed over with the memory filling him up.

"You always liked pink on me," she turned her head to look at him. Her hair swung along her shoulders and the lilac sweater. If she'd been able to touch any other part of him, she would've kissed him with her cold, dead lips just to go back remembering what he tasted like, felt like. "I just wanted to kiss you," her voice was soft and it quivered as if she were suddenly cold or losing her cool. Logan wanted to touch her, sink into her, run away with her, and be like her.

"And you did," Logan said twisting the memory of their first kiss under water in his brain, him hitting the bottom. She swam into him and shoved him into the ground of the pool. She pressed her lips to his, twisting their lips open and for a few seconds they breathed together, in chlorine filled water, eyes red and dry when they came up to the surface. "Definitely in the top ten," he grinned.

Lilly screeched. "It better be above that one you and Veronica had at the hotel, even if that was kind of hot," she responded with a small wink. Her hand was still placed softly, delicately on his knee and he resisted every urge to entwine his fingers with hers, just for old times sake. She watched his eyes the way they gazed heavily on her fingertips. There were certain things she'd been told she could do, say goodbye, touch him with one hand and then leave fading away into the abyss. "Go ahead," she urged him on reading his thoughts.

Logan moved his right hand from the ground where it had been picking up sand. He let it fall in between his fingertips. She had visited him before, quite often after her murder and then the visits became less frequent. Now, he knew deep down, this was the last time. Their fingers entwined flawlessly, almost as if they'd never fallen apart. Lilly was surprisingly warmer than he'd anticipated, which only made him that much more sad with the knowledge, that soon, goodbye would come. Her nails were pink and he would've asked her how or why but the thoughts skipped in his brain like a broken record.

"That was different," Logan responded to her earlier comment. He waited for her to say something but she just stared at their fingertips, entangled. "Veronica and I…" he trailed off feeling the sadness of the predicament of his life drip forward into his thoughts. He squeezed her hand and it felt so real that he was sure the instant she was gone, he'd break down into the mess he was slowly but surely becoming. He was this summer's Veronica Mars. Teenage outcast.

"She kissed you first," Lilly offered into the open air. "I always knew you guys would be hot together," she twisted her lips into a grin but he could see a certain amount of sorrow on her beautiful, fragile face. "I don't know about her and Duncan," and she didn't say anything else about Veronica and him. He wanted to believe that maybe it was too painful for her to think about or just think about the two of them. It could've been that she didn't have much time left and wanted to say the things she didn't get a chance to say.

"That note you wrote me and the shot glass. I loved them you know. I wanted to hate you but I was fucking your father and we weren't together. I always loved you in my own way," and she offered him another smile but it hurt her too much. She could see the numb expression in his face. The way his eyes stared hopelessly into the sand as if something would sprout up to explain to him all the things that had gone terribly wrong in his life.

When she was alive, loving him was second nature, like having sex and drinking alcohol. It was easy to sustain inside of her but she'd never really told him, never uttered the words out loud because it gave him too much power and Lilly couldn't have that. In death, loving him was hard, like gutting her insides and laying them on a table where they couldn't be reached and his insides were a part of her, breaking and foaming at the mouth but she couldn't reach any of it. She couldn't touch him the way she used to or place all that unspoken love into a heavy kiss where saliva dripped and spilled over them as they squirmed under the others' touch.

Those days were over and Logan was just as dead inside as she was, except he kept breathing. Saying goodbye to Veronica in a dream was less painful. Duncan had been easy but Logan was making her forget all perspective of time and gravity.

"I only ever called one person my boyfriend," and he knew that was her way of saying she was sorry for all the things she'd done to him, for her affair with Weevil for fucking her father and all the other things he had yet to learn about. She never could come right out and apologize. It wasn't her style and he would've crumbled if she had because then it wouldn't be his Lilly sitting beside him and just the devil playing an evil, evil trick on him.

"I know," Logan ran the skin of his thumb along the bridge of hers as he talked. "I know, Lilly," he said again, accenting her name while his tongue hit the roof of his mouth. He watched as her knees tilted upwards and out of the sand, blue jeans meshed with the color of copper. Lilly turned to face him, her hair fluttering in the wind behind her and then into her face, almost covering her ocean-colored eyes.

Their fingers parted as she placed the palm of her hands into the sand, pushing herself closer to him and yet the closer Lilly got, the farther away she felt. He couldn't stroke her fingers anymore or feel the warmth that had surprisingly penetrated through her to him like some small little miracle of life and death.

"I don't have a lot of time left Logan," Lilly said loudly trying to emphasize the point. But alive she was always loud and obnoxious, making sure everyone paid attention to her even if later she'd complain about never getting a moment to herself. That was what he loved about her. Now it was what he almost hated about her if only because the noise would fade and he'd be left with the sound of the waves crashing and the lighter in his pocket clapping opened and closed. Logan sighed, closing his eyes.

"I'll pay for this," she expected, tossing her hands in the air and throwing her legs back into the sand.

The sweater he loved so much perched against his chest and he opened his eyes just in time to see her eyelids flutter. Their lips locked, magically combining both their sadness, death, and longing. No tongues erupted from the others mouth just lips intermingling there, like an open love letter to the heart. The palms of her hands were hot along his cheeks as he closed his eyes tightly, savoring the taste of her. Lilly tasted just the way he remembered her, cupcakes and cherry lip-gloss mixed with nicotine and vodka in the daytime. A gush of wind struck past them, knocking him down and her lips away from his.

"Don't forget me." Logan heard her whisper before he opened his eyes to find her gone but her scent lingered in the cold midnight air. He reached for the pack of cigarettes that had been resting to his side and found that they were gone, no doubt under a pile of sand somewhere. He couldn't help but wonder if she'd taken them away with her to wherever it was she was staying now. The sky, probably, resting on some darkened, dusty cloud with her legs dangling over it glancing at the stars or maybe she was some place where she could dance all night long in some heated nightclub and seduce all the dead strangers with her body. Logan liked that idea more than he'd expected to. It was easier to understand her desires in death than it had been when she was alive. Lilly was a cannonball; floating through the space continuum and only stopping for the places and things she wanted. At least that's how Logan imagined her.

The End


End file.
